Speaking the language of the heart: Listening with the ears of your heart.

Someone said to me recently “I can’t always tell when you are joking or when you are being serious.” I was half pleased about this. The truth is that sometimes I am at my most serious when I am joking, or at least half joking. There is a place for humour, even in the most serious situations. Sometimes absurdity, helps get you through. “There is a time for everything under the sun.”

People often call to ask my advice about things. I am not sure why they do, as I am loathed to give advice. I will listen and I will share my experience, but I am loathed to tell another person what they should or shouldn’t do. How would I know in any case. The times I do, when I am very direct, are few and far between and they are usually what you might call emergency moments. Again “There is a time for everything under the sun”

I have learnt that often in life all that people really need is someone to share things with, someone who will listen and empathise, not solve their problems for them. I am usually good at this, although sometimes I am not. I have my limits. I noticed I had drifted away while listening to someone the other day. The truth was that I was exhausted. I had been holding a rather challenging memorial service, which had just ended. Someone was sharing some things with me afterwards and I had just drifted away. There are other times when I get distracted by the events of my life too, sometimes the distraction can help.

This happened on Monday. I was out in the park with Molly. She was a having a whale of a time playing with other dogs. She has become a bit of a ball thief. She is not really interested in the ball, she has just learned that if she grabs the ball and runs off with it, then the other dog will chase her. She loves being chased and she loves to wrestle with other dogs. While she was playing my phone rang. It was a friend whose mum has been seriously ill and has been in hospital. She had some concerns about her mum as well as other family issues. She needed to talk. I listened and encouraged and then suddenly found myself distracted by the dog Molly was playing with getting over excited and somewhat amorous. It is ok as he isn’t intact. The dogs owner did nothing as she was engaged in an exercise class with a whole load of other women. I have met them before and her cockerpoo likes to dominate. I spent the next twenty minutes trying to be there for my friend, whilst having to constantly pull the other dog off Molly, only to have her run back to him to continue the wrestling. It was right scene. I kept apologising to my friend. She didn’t mind. Infact if truth be told I think it helped her. The levity and absurdity of the situation lifted her out of her concerns. She was calling for advice or someone to solve her problems, she just needed to talk. More importantly she just needed someone to listen, despite their own problems, someone to bare witness. Not someone to fix, or solve the problem, just to listen, to be present to her. Thankfully as the week has gone on her mum is improving as his her anxiety.

I spend much of my time listening to others, actually to life itself. It is a large part of my role as a minister. Most of the worship I create comes from listening, on oh so many levels and then making some sense of it all. This address being a good example.

Now while I do listen to life on oh so many levels, I do enjoy listening to words spoken from human lips. Words are powerful things, they touch deep places within us. And yet all that words are, when reduced to their merely physical components are vibrating air. This is true and yet it really isn’t true. Words are so much more than their physical components. They connect people to deep, deep places in one another’s beings. They are imitations of the Divine I suspect, they are like seeds in so many ways, they begin to bring salvation or utter destruction. And yet they are just noises formed from vibrating air.

I love listening to people when they speak from their heart; I love listening to people when they speak what they must speak. I have particularly enjoyed listening to the many and varied people who have attended the groups I lead at both congregations. I am fascinated by what comes from those in attendance. I just love listening to folk as they try to articulate their varied understandings of life and their personal spirituality to others. It is the same thing in other groups that I attend, as folk try to articulate their experiences. I love to hear the language of the heart and I love to listen with the ears of my heart. It is Divine activity, it is love coming to life.

Being listened to and especially being accepted and understood is so vital to all people. I have noticed this particularly in the grief group I host. Whenever a new person attends the one common feature for everyone is this sense of loneliness that they express after the loved one has gone, how they feel unheard by others, like their words are not being accepted or that others have tired of hearing them. The beauty of the group is that each can come and speak freely and are truly accepted. I have witnessed some moments of deep connection within the group. I have truly seen love incarnated in the air and words that we share together, it is a truly beautiful blessing.

There is something truly beautiful is speaking words, heart to heart. The language of the heart is not really about correct use of words but a way of being with each other, it is an intention, it is about invitation it is about allowing others to be who they are in your space, this is true openness by the way. Openness is not about telling another all about yourself, instead it is about inviting another to be themselves in your space.

Words connect us in some very special ways, they can be incredibly powerful. They can begin to bring deep healing or can be deeply destructive. What matters is the intention behind them. What seems to matter is the condition of our heart and soul as we speak what we must speak.

Words are powerful they can be either destructive or creative. Perhaps an example of their creative power comes at the beginning of John’s Gospel and the following lines:

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.'

According to John the spoken word can literally create life, in fact all life. Now of course in the original Greek, which these opening words were written in the word for “Word” was originally “Logos” which roughly translated actually does not mean merely “word,” but also “speech,” “principle,” “meaning” or “thought.” In Greek philosophy, it is also referred to as Divine Reason or the Mind of God. So it could mean God speaking life into being, linking it to the first verses from Genesis when God is said to have breathed life into being, remembering always that he saw this creation as “Good”. So “word” here means, in my view, that life is the meaning coming into being and Jesus is the example of this in human form. An example we can all aspire to. For we can all incarnate Love, we can all be a part of the Divine creation. It begins in our words and how we say these words for they are an expression of our meaning. It also begins in how we listen to others. Our ability for each to share, an open loving invitation. This Divine activity. This space between us is the Kin-dom of Love.

When we speak we are not merely flapping our lips, vibrating air we are engaged in Divine activity we are creating or destroying life. It is the same with listening. If we listen with ears of heart we are creating sacred space, this Kin-dom of Love.

There is no greater gift that you can give to another than your time and your presence. When we do, we are truly engaged in Divine activity. You don’t have to say much. Rarely can you solve their troubles. You can give them the most precious gift you possess though, your time and your loving presence. I have often found in those moments the love of God coming alive in me and in the person I am sharing my time and space with.

Minister need it too. I have been accompanied by many people this last year or so. It has touched me deeply. So many folk have been a good loving friend at times. I also sought out professional help, which has now come to an end. Thank you for the help there. This time and space has helped me heal and be ready to move forward in love. I was also intently listened for a couple of hours at the beginning of the year. I was interviewed for a book. I was sent the first draft of the section written from this interview the other day. It was fascinating to read what the author came up with. He was a great listener. I noticed that during that time, sharing my heart and being listened to, I reached some deeper truths about myself, this life, and the God of my limited understanding that is the heart of it. Something the author noticed and commented on in the piece her wrote. It was the same with Hannah the psychologist. That time being listened to in a skillfull way has enabled me to find those sometimes hard to reach places. I am grateful for this. It has enabled me to do listen more intently, to be fully present to this life and those I share it with.

I love people; I love listening to people, to connect with what they are sharing, what they are struggling with. I love to identify with others, to connect. It makes me feel so alive. Now of course this is my job, I am after all a minister. That said we can all minister, to minister is to serve and how do we serve, well by giving our hearts to each other, by opening the ears of our hearts, by creating sacred space.

I’m going to end this address with a beautiful bit of wisdom by Nancy Shaffer “Hauling Out Stones”, which I believe exemplifies what I have been talking about here.

“Hauling Out Stones” by Nancy Shaffer

Once, he said an odd thing:
Forgiving begins with someone
sitting near.
Later, he said, It isn’t for the one
who did the hurting.
It’s the other one who needs it.
One day, without warning,
he wept.
I sat close.
He told an old hurt
in half-sentences and single words
like stones he was coming upon, new;
like tree limbs, broken,
which he needed both arms for hauling aside.
A half-dozen times that summer we sat,
he weeping, hauling out stones,
gathering limbs; I near.
The stones got smaller,
his sentences, longer.
He said, It’s the crying part
I couldn’t do by myself.
And later he said, I feel cleaned out.
A wan smile.
Still later, he said,
I think I’ve done it.
Made a kind of peace, he meant.
He slapped his palm hard against mine.
Laughed. Slapped his palm again.

So lets create that space, where love comes to life. Let’s encourage the language of the heart, lets listen with the ears of our hearts. For if we do, that Kin-dom of Love will begin to built right here, right now.

The devotion below is based on the material in this "blogspot"

Happy Birthday: Thanks For Your Life

This "blogspot" begins with a few thoughts on “Birthday’s” by Henri Nouwen

Birthdays are so important. On our birthdays we celebrate being alive. On our birthdays people can say to us, “Thank you for being!” Birthday presents are signs of our families’ and friends’ joy that we are part of their lives. Little children often look forward to their birthdays for months. Their birthdays are their big days, when they are the centre of attention and all their friends come to celebrate.
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We should never forget our birthdays or the birthdays of those who are close to us. Birthdays keep us childlike. They remind us that what is important is not what we do or accomplish, not what we have or who we know, but that we are, here and now. On birthdays let us be grateful for the gift of life.

Last Saturday was one of those very busy days. I had lots of things to attend to. It didn’t start well. My car was frozen and wouldn’t start. I couldn’t do anything about it immediately as I had to open the Hilary Azzize for the Altrincham Court Leet. I was made a Freeman of Altrincham a few years ago, for services to the community, particularly in the area of mental health and addiction, and serve as chaplain to the Court Leet. I led devotions based on impermanence and the uncertainty of life. As part of the devotion we shared a time of silence to honour those who had died in recent times that were either members of the Court Leet or close friends and family members. I knew several of those named, two were close to my heart, one very much so. As I left I swallowed hard as I thought of those lost lives and the impact they had on my life and the lives of so many others. I then called breakdown recovery to get my car going. I had two birthday celebrations to get to, one in the afternoon and another in the evening. I called ahead to warn that I might be late for the first celebration. The recovery man arrived got in my car turned the ignition and it started first time. The car had thawed completely, it had been minus 4 when I got up that morning and I had foolishly not driven the car In days. It has not been a problem since. After much mirth and laughter I quickly got changed and went to the first birthday. A chapel Carolyn Jones was celebrating her 80th birthday and all the important people from her life were there to share in her celebration. Her son Richard gave a wonderful telling of the story of her life, her achievements and the things that mean the most to her. She has lived quite a life, including overcoming a severe form of cancer in recent years, and it was wonderful to share in her celebration. I left to get home to take Molly for a walk, I was feeling guilty as I wasn’t spending much time with her that day. I then went out to share a friends birthday meal. She is a recovery friend, and it was wonderful to celebrate her life, with two distinct groups of people. Her family and her long-term friends, along with a whole group of friends from recovery. It was a wonderful night, celebrating her life and of course her new life that she is embarking on. It has been wonderful watching this woman grow and thrive in recent times. Wonderful to share and enjoy her journey. I then went home to spend the rest of the night with Molly, who herself has recently had her first half birthday, she recently turned 6 months old. I certainly didn’t need to eat again. I had enjoyed two meals and three pieces of cake. Very nice cake indeed. The cake brought me right back to childhood and memories of baking with my grandma. It’s taste and texture were identical to the cakes and buns she baked. It was a lovely memory.

Birthdays are oh so important and they should be marked and celebrated. They are truly “Holy Days”; they are an opportunity to honour the sacredness of our lives; they are opportunities to recognise one another’s sacred uniqueness. As Henri Nouwen so delightfully said “We should never forget our birthdays or the birthdays of those who are close to us. Birthdays keep us childlike. They remind us that what is important is not what we do or accomplish, not what we have or who we know, but that we are, here and now. On birthdays let us be grateful for the gift of life.”

I regret not celebrating either of my birthday’s last year. I really wasn’t in the mood. It was wrong of me to do so and somewhat selfish actually. Please do not let me do so again.

Some people have two birthdays. I am not just talking about the Monarch here by the way. Folk in recovery also celebrate a second birthday. They celebrate their sobriety birthday as well as their belly button birthday, a kind of re-birthday if you like. Mine is the 10th October 2003. On these days they turn down a different path, they begin their life journey again. They turn from non-being to living. Forrest Church when talking about the beginning of his new life after finding sobriety wrote the following in the last few months of his life as he was succumbing to cancer:

"Taken literally (in Hebrew and Greek as well as Latin), "conversion" is not "re-birth" but "turning". Once converted, we re-direct our journey. The American short-story writer Raymond Carver turned his life around by a decision to stop drinking. From that point forward, he met life's trials with equanimity and grace. When dying of brain cancer at the age of forty-nine. Carver summed up the nine years of freedom he had enjoyed during what turned out to be the final decade of his life with the same word that lept to mind when I give daily thanks for a yearlong reprieve from my cancer: "gravy". When we see life as the precious gift that it is, when we celebrate our birthday as a truly holy day we see that everything is indeed “gravy”.

Here he is in his own words, the poem “Gravy”.

“Gravy” by Raymond Carver

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

They say we only get one crack at life; this is true to some degree. That said we can at times begin again. When all feels lost at times, sometime it’s just the beginning of the end of an old way of being that may lead us down another path. We can begin again in love.

This week I conducted the memorial service of one such woman. One who lived a life of love and service for the last 37 years of life, one remembered fondly by those she helped. She made great use of her life and many of her friends wanted to remember this. It is always fascinating what you learn about a person at their funeral and or memorial service. It was good to hear about Carolyn, from her son Richard, while she is still with us, something that was not guaranteed in recent times.

As I was reflecting on these lives, both lost and celebrated. I was reminded of a poem, very popular at funerals these days.

It's called the “Dash” by Linda Ellis

I read of a man who stood to speak
At the funeral of a friend
He referred to the dates on the tombstone
From the beginning...to the end

He noted that first came the date of birth
And spoke the following date with tears,
But he said what mattered most of all
Was the dash between those years

For that dash represents all the time
That they spent alive on earth.
And now only those who loved them
Know what that little line is worth

For it matters not, how much we own,
The cars...the house...the cash.
What matters is how we live and love
And how we spend our dash.

I know it’s a bit of a folksy poem, but its message is deep, powerful and meaning filled. The dash appears short and even thin and yet it can be deep and meaning filled.

Again this brought me back to another extract from Forrest Church’s masterpiece “Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow”, written while he was dying of oesophageal cancer. He asked "knowing that we will die, what should we do?" To which he answered "we should live, we should laugh, and we should love." He then recalled a lesson he learnt from his children, about living. One day, when they were young, he was walking them to school, on a busy New York street. Suddenly a car swerved round a corner and almost killed them all. Forrest was incensed by this, but he remembers, "my kids just laughed, romping blithely down the sidewalk, jumping from tree to tree as they always did, trying to touch the leaves." The kids were celebrating, nay singing the joy of living, and they "had the right idea. Why didn't I think to jump and touch the leaves?"

Forrest believed that it was living, loving and laughing that took real courage, they required heart, while dying didn’t really take much courage at all, in his eyes that just came naturally. Something he was experiencing as he wrote these words.

Now to really live Forrest suggested a simple little mantra:" Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are." He didn’t suggest that this would be easy but it is the only way to live and in so doing we will live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for by the love we leave behind. There was a lot of love celebrated in the lives of those living and those who have died in the last week.

I believe that Forrest uncovered a simple little answer as to how each of us should live, a way to bring deep meaning to the ordinariness of our lives. This is how we should live. To want the things that make up our lives and not wish for something else and in so doing we might just begin to be who we truly are, instead of wishing we were someone else. In so doing we can do the things that we are able to do and thus bring deep meaning to the little bit of the dash that we are living right now.

This is the gift of life, the beautiful gift of being alive in this ordinary moment, a moment that can become deep and meaningful, not only for ourselves but for those we get to share our lives with. For we never know how long we’ve got left how close we are to the end of the line, the last part of dash. Nor do we know how close those we love are to the end of theirs. At the memorial service I heard of another friend who has been given a very bad cancer diagnosis, he is facing it with courage as he has so many things over the years.

So how do we end this little dash of a service. Well I will offer a ittle bit of wisdom by Kurt Vonnegut, towards the end of his life.

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to famous authors and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond. Here is his response. It is magnificent:

“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

So, let’s go live our lives. It is the ultimate free gift, the ultimate grace, it’s gravy. Go live whatever time we have best, let’s do it in style.

Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"

Winter: There is a time for Everything Under the Sun

I am usually my most fatigued on Monday’s. Sunday does take a lot out of me. I know some folk don’t think I do much during the rest of my week, but I do. I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked after the Sunday service “So what do you do the rest of the week?” I know that sometimes people are just being funny, but at other times the question is asked in all seriousness. I will not begin to recite for you. People do sometimes ask the most obvious of questions. A young woman did come up to me in a bar recently and asked me “If I come here often”. I think she was joking, but you never know.

Monday can be a low energy day for me. A day when my mood is usually at its lowest and I generally just go through the motions of some work activities. I clear up from the week that has gone and begin to build for the week ahead. Monday’s tend to always have a wintery feel about them.

Now did you know that this last Monday has been given a special name, it is called “Blue Monday.” No not the song by New Order, but a day that is regarded as the hardest of the year. The Christmas spirit has all gone and we are right in depths of winter. It is dark, it is cold and there is little light around, Spring seems so far away. There will not be another public holiday until Easter and that seems quite a long way into the distance.

The day light hours will increase over the coming weeks but still we must face winter. January and February can be difficult as we feel stuck in the cold on these dark winter evenings. It has been cold this week, it has felt like winter. It seems like we have gone through a few long winters of late. This one seems as hard as ever. Already it is being called a “Winter of Discontent”. Life does seem ever more difficult for most folk. When will winter be finally over, so many of us cry. There is light, I can see it all around me.

Winter is not an easy time, so many of us want it over as soon as possible. We want spring and the new birth and life that it brings, but that is not the way to live and we know it. To live, always looking towards the spring yet to come, is to fail to fully experience what is present now. There is such richness in the dark cold of winter and we need to feel it and allow our eyes to adjust to the darkness. There is a beautiful wonder about winter that we would do well to embrace. There is a need to embrace and fully experience the darkness, the lifelessness and the starkness of this time of year. We should not wish it all away, for everything there is a season and a time for everything under the sun. We need winter, as hard it feels. All things need to properly come to an end in order for what is new to truly come to fruition. The beauty and the meaning of life comes in its finiteness.

I have noticed this in myself of late. Last winter was a tough time for me personally. I came through it though. I faithfully stuck at things and this year it is almost as if I am another person. Last Monday may have supposedly been “Blue Monday”, but I did not feel blue at all. In fact, I felt as alert and energised as I have ever done. I had a lovely day, just going about my daily business, noticing the wintery world around me. Molly and I went and enjoyed a good two hour walk around Altrincham and a long play in the park. She was six months old last Monday and I enjoyed marking the occasion and enjoying this precious blessing in my life. I also enjoyed observing the changing winter scene all around us.

Yes winter can look bleak and barren at times, but it didn’t feel like it last Monday, despite the world telling me it was “Blue Monday”

As Molly ran off to play with a gang of dogs in the park I found myself examining a barren tree. It looked vulnerable just standing there all alone and yet I knew it was alive as it stood there bold and upright. It reminded me of my own vulnerability and my exposure to the cold of winter and to the challenges of life, challenges I do not shrink from, even though I do from time to time feel tempted. As the last year or so have proved once again.

Everyone wants to feel safe, protected and warm, not cold, exposed and vulnerable. It is a refuge that we all seek, often it is a refuge that folk seek and believe they will find in religion and spirituality. This sense that we are protected and safe, but is it realistic? So often we seek protection from the troubles of life, from its winter. If life has taught me anything it has shown me that the insulation I often seek so easily becomes isolation. These attempts to protect myself from exposure only increase the suffering. If I have learnt anything in life it’s that self-protection just cuts you off and leaves you feeling all alone, once again.

One of the advantages of ministry is that it forces you to pay attention to the passing seasons. By doing so you learn to appreciate what each has to offer. Winter has so much to offer if we would but let ourselves appreciate it. The trees in winter have much to teach we who would prefer to hibernate. If I have learnt anything I have learnt that the spiritual life is about living openly and vulnerably, it’s about accepting the reality of life. It’s about standing their upright, arms outstretch in the cold vulnerability of life waiting for the time of re-birth and renewal in whatever form this takes, just like the trees in winter.

The spiritual life is also about not clinging. The power of our finite lives is in the impermanence of all created life. Thus giving us a time for everything under the sun, including death. The power and beauty of our lives comes in its finiteness. Nothing ever lasts forever. That said although our lives and the lives of our loved ones someday come to an end, life does go on and love does indeed remain. To quote Ecclesiastes 1 v 4 “Generations come and generations go, but the earth abides forever”

“For everything there is a season.” The wisdom contained within the book Ecclesiastes, particularly the verses from the third chapter that we heard earlier, has stood the test of time. There is good reason for this; it speaks an eternal and universal truth that generation after generation have found that they can relate to. The power of this ancient source lays in its ability to link we who live today with the generations that have walked the earth before us. We all of us have travelled many and varied journeys and lived through all the seasons of life. Nothing is permanent and nothing lasts forever. No one will ever escape the pain of life, but that ought not bring despair because if we remain open we will also know life’s joy. Yes, there is a time to mourn, but there is also a time to dance; there is a time to weep, but there is also a time to laugh. Again, the last 12 months have shown me the proof of this.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” There are many seasons in our lives, just as there are many different emotions. Yes, sometimes we can experience all those emotions in one single day, just as we can experience four seasons in one day. There is a time and perhaps a place for all them, for to diminish any of them is deny what it is to be fully human. Yes, there is a time to weep, just as there is a time to laugh and there is a time to mourn, just as much as there is a time to dance.

I have wept many times this last year and I have held others in their suffering too, that said I have also laughed many times, I have seen joy and I have seen how life continues on. Again to repeat Ecclesiastes 1 v 4 “Generations come and generations go, but the earth abides forever”

Ecclesiastes really speaks to me, it reveals an authentic truth. I love Ecclesiastes. I love is because it is real, it is authentic. Like the changing seasons life is forever changing, it is impermanent, nothing last forever. Rami Shapiro writes of its wisdom:

"The world revealed in Ecclesiastes is an impermanent world of continual emptying. Ecclesiastes calls this hevel. Trying to grasp something in this world, trying to hold on to anything in this world, leaves you breathless, exhausted, and anxious. This impermanence is the nature of nature, and because this is so, the world lacks surety and certainty; change and the unknowing that change carries with it are the hallmarks of life. In Ecclesiastes you spend no time longing for escape from impermanence, but rather learn to live well in the midst of it. This is what the Book of Ecclesiastes wants to tell us. This is why it was written. This is why it is still read some twenty-five hundred years later."

Eccleciates teaches me what it means to live authentically and truly religiously. That said it is a religion that is not pointing to Salvation beyond this life, but in this life. This to me is the essence of my Unitarian faith. It is not pointing to something beyond this life, but within this life. Which you can only truly experience by letting go of control and allow life to have its way with you, every season of life and every feeling of life. In so doing you will live the life you have been given, the ultimate gift, the ultimate grace. The next life, whatever that may be, will take care of itself.

Last Monday was meant to be the most miserable day of the year, Blue Monday. I didn’t feel that myself. I utterly felt the joy of living actually, as I connected to life all around me, as well as in my own heart. I felt as close to God as I have ever done. That is not to say I was turning away from the suffering in this world. There has been pain and suffering in my life this last year. There is pain and suffering in those I hold most dear in my life right now. I spoke with several of them on Monday. I did not turn away, nore did I try to fix them. I just shared in their pain, if only for a little while. This week I have been with many people experiencing the most difficult kinds of suffering. There is much pain in those I hold dear to my heart too. There is also a time to relive my own suffering in the past, I need to in order to truly empathise with others, in order to minister, to serve, to be with another in their pain. The pain is the price I pay for daring to love, a pearl of the greatest price. It is the refusal to close myself to this pain that allows me to do the things I am here to do. It gives me meaning even in the most painful suffering. It also enables me to know joy, even when there is suffering all around me.

“Generations come and generations go, but the earth abides forever” So does love. Something beautiful remains. We cannot escape the suffering in life. We cannot cling to anything even those things and those people we love the most. The generations come and the generations go, just as the seasons do also. That said we can plant seeds of love right here right now. We can walk side by side with one another, we can hold each other and bear witness to one another’s tears. We can also laugh and dance and make merry even in the midst of real suffering too. We can live our lives fully regardless of how many seasons we have left. And when the time comes we can let go of our lives with dignity and grace.

Remembering always that while our individual lives come and go, just like the seasons, both the earth and love abides forever.

Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"

The Spiritual Life: Living Spiritually Alive

Last Saturday night I was out with friends. It was a late night and so Molly had a sleep over with a couple of other friends. I say I was out with friends, when in actual fact I only knew some of the people and only two or three very well. A friend was having a leaving do as he was returning to live back in London. The group were mutual friends of his. Now I got talking to quite a variety of people that evening, all much younger than me, in their twenties, all millennials or Generation Z’s. My profession came up and as is always the case many assumptions, along with a great deal of surprise, followed. I got into one a conversation with a young woman who wanted to talk about her beliefs with regard to death and the afterlife. As is usually the case in such conversations she did most of the talking, I did the listening. She was very certain in what she believed and described in detailed what the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” has to say about life beyond this life. It was fascinating to listen to her and her views about the afterlife and reincarnation, She, was somewhat surprised to hear that I myself was fairly agnostic about what happens beyond this physical life. It is not that I don’t believe in anything, it is more that it is difficult for me to hold strong views about something I have no personal experience of. My spirituality is very much informed by experience. I also said something like “I prefer to focus on one life at a time”

I had a couple of other conversations with people who are struggling with life in some ways. They were asking about spiritual practice and how to improve on them, they described feeling overwhelmed and anxious a lot of the time. I shared some experiences, but mainly I listened, ministry is mostly about listening.

I have had many deep profound spiritual experiences in my life, sometimes incredibly beautiful and connective and other times quite unpleasant, as they have been around the death of loved ones. I have also experienced thousands of moments of transcendence and connection in the ordinariness of life. Moments when I have paid attention and thus seen life in new ways as well as moments of deep connection when I touch the core of myself and life, perhaps, dare I say, touched the heart of God. I had a wonderful opportunity to remember and share some of these the other day whilst being interviewed for a chapter in a book on “Happiness”, it will be published next year.

The many conversations I have had recently got me thinking about spiritual practices and their purpose, particularly prayer and meditation, something I engage with throughout my daily living. Yes, sometimes formerly with others as well as privately, but also informally as I live my ordinary life. Some might not consider these to be spiritual practices at all, they are to me.

I have discovered how vital of this is in order to live, to be fully alive in this world. I remember Bill Darlison once saying that “Spirituality” is about increasing our sensitivity to life. To me this means being affected by and thus becoming more effective in life. This helps me understand the purpose of prayer and meditation which enables me to do so, I have discovered. Such practices allow me to connect to the core of my being and thus to life itself; such practices enable me to connect to God which I see as being a part of everything, perhaps the core of everything and yet more than everything, a kind of panentheism, not to be confused with pantheism.

Henri Nouwen captured the idea near perfectly in his meditation “The Hub”

In my home country, the Netherlands, you still see many large wagon wheels, not on wagons, but as decorations at the entrances of farms or on the wall of restaurants. I have always been fascinated by these wagon wheels: with their wide rims, strong wooden spokes, and big hubs. These wheels help me to understand the importance of a life lived from the centre. When I move along the rim, I can reach one spoke after the other, but when I stay at the hub, I am in touch with all the spokes at once.

To pray is to move to the centre of all life and love. The closer I come to the hub of life, the closer I come to all that receives its strength and energy from there. My tendency is to get so distracted by the diversity of the many spokes of life, that I am busy but not truly life giving, all over the place but not focused. By directing my attention to the heart of life, I am connected with its rich variety while remaining centred. What does the hub represent? I think of it as my own heart, the heart of God, and the heart of the world. When I pray, I enter into the depth of my own heart and find there the heart of God, who speaks to me of Love. And I recognise, right there, the place where all my sisters and brothers are in communion with one another. The great paradox of the spiritual life is, indeed, that the most personal is most universal, that the most intimate, is the communal, and that the most contemplative is most active.

The wagon wheel shows that the hub is the centre of all energy and movement, even when it often seems not to be moving at all. In God all action and all rest are one. So too prayer!

The last few sentences are worth repeating again. They touch my soul so deeply.

“The great paradox of the spiritual life is, indeed, that the most personal is most universal, that the most intimate, is the communal, and that the most contemplative is most active.

The wagon wheel shows that the hub is the centre of all energy and movement, even when it often seems not to be moving at all. In God all action and all rest are one. So too prayer!”

The great traditions offer a treasure trove of practices, that can help us to connect more fully to life, the most obvious being prayer. Prayer means many things to different people and has done so throughout the ages. You may find yourself praying without even realising it. It may sound strange to see this, but can actually be quite a physical practice, this manifest in a variety of ways in different traditions While a Christian may bow their heads and fold their hands, a Sufi will whirl and a native American will dance. A Buddhist will sit quietly in a particular position, while a Hindu will offer a sacrifice. Jewish and Muslim prayers are very physical. A Jewish person while praying will bob their heads back and forth while a Muslim will physically prostate themselves. Prayers are not just about silence and spoken words. You sing a prayer too, isn’t that was hymns are. I think it was Augustine who said singing was praying twice; I myself love singing mediation. I also believe that joy and laughter can be considered a form of devotion, for it connects to those deeper aspects of life.

The spiritual life is about increasing this connection, it’s about enabling us to pay greater attention to the world around us, to be affected by life and to live more effectively in life. Thus, you feel more spiritually alive.

Spiritual practice can take many forms and should not be seen necessarily as a solemn activity, done in isolation. Yes, we can close ourselves away and pray in isolation as Jesus suggested we should, but it’s not essential. Neither do we have to necessarily use words when we are praying, every activity we engage in can be a form of prayer.

In the Japanese Shinto tradition prayers and blessings are calliagraphed on paper streamers and tied to the branches of trees and bushes. As the streamers wave in the wind the blessings then fly out over the world. In Tibet prayers are carved into wooden band wheels which are spun like a top sending the prayers up into the sky. Sometimes the wheels are positioned in a stream so that the current of the water spins the wheels and the prayers are then carried off without the need of human assistance.

One of the five pillars of Islamic practice is to pray facing Mecca five times every day, here it’s not so much the words but the direction of the prayers that matter. During the middle ages monastic orders that took vows of silence considered work done by the hands as a form of prayer – therefore everything that was done in life was considered a prayer to God. This seems very similar to the mindfulness practiced by Zen Buddhist – in which every action is practiced with deep attention. Such practices are not self indulgent they are there to enable the individual to better engage in life itself, to pay deep attention, to be affected and thus become increasingly effective. It helps me find my voice and thus speak of what it means to live spiritually alive, they actually change me at a deep level. They are meant to. To quote Rheinhold Neibuhr “Prayer does not change things; prayer changes people, and people change things...Prayer is not hearing voices, prayer is acquiring a voice.” Everything we do, if practiced with intention, if we pay attention can become a prayer. As Dorothy Day put it “I believe some people – lots of people- pray through the witness of their lives. Through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people.” In so doing we can unlock our true human potential and become all that we were born to be.

The spiritual life is about increasing our sensitivity to life. It is about being affected by and thus becoming more effective in life. What it really does for me is that it enables me to truly pay attention and not to turn away, even when I am tempted to do so. Sometimes it is hard and deeply painful to pay attention, but it is the only way to truly feel alive. Paying attention is of course prayer, to quote Simone Weil “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,”, but it is more than that though, it is deeper, for as Mary Oliver said “Attention without feeling, is only a report.” What we pay attention to has to affect us, it much touch us in those deeper places, this is prayer and requires prayer to practice.

This is beautifully portrayed in Mary Oliver’s wonderful poem “A Summer’s Day”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver “A Summer Day”

To live spiritually alive is about increasing our sensitivity to life, its about paying deep attention, intentionally, its about being affected and thus becoming increasingly effective in life. This requires prayer in its rich variety of form. It won’t change the world, but it will change us and enable us to live fully in this world, for as Reinhold Niebuhr said “Prayer doesn’t change things, prayer changes people and people change things.” Over the years I have discovered that it is prayer that enables me to open and connect to life in all its joy and suffering, it allows me to increase my sensitivity to life and thus be touched by life and in return respond in more loving and open ways. Prayer for me is a kind of opening of myself to something larger. In many ways it is the whole of my life, this life. The next, well I no nothing about that, well at least with certainty.

May life be your prayer. Whether that be your devotional practices or just the way that you act with friends and loved ones. Whether it be the reflective pause before you do or say anything, or a quiet time at some point in the day, whether it be dancing or singing around your kitchen or some dedicated pleace. Whatever it may be let all that you say and do reflect all that you would hope your life to be. Open yourself up to every encounter in every moment and you will bring to life the divine within you and in every aspect of your life.

So, let’s live more spiritually alive. May our lives become our prayer.

Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"

 

Regret: To Greet the Future or Lament the Past

During the Christmas season I found myself in a few conversations about guilt and shame. While they may appear similar, and they can be equally as powerful in affecting our lives, they are not, they come from a different aspect of our humanity. Guilt can spur is into action, to make positive change in our lives, or that of others and the world in which we live. Guilt is a product of a healthy conscience, a person who claims never to feel any sense of guilt is either deluding themselves or potentially sociopathic. Shame is not the same as guilt at all. As the wonderful Brene Brown has said “ Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement."

Guilt and shame are equally powerful emotions, they can have an intense power over our lives and can push and pull a person in one direction or the other, they are opposites.The feeling of guilt can often compel a person to put right what was wrong, to heal a past hurt, or broken relationship. Whereas the desire to avoid the perceived humiliation of shame, by making the first move, may prevent a person from doing so. Yes, guilt and shame are both powerful emotions, one can be harnessed positively, whilst the other is only ever negative and destructive.

During one conversation a friend began telling me of some regrets they had about their life. We discussed what could be done and I shared some recent experiences in my own life. I have myself finally come to peace with some guilt and regret in recent months, it has lifted a great weight from my psyche, something family members commented on over Christmas. It seems I have once again been liberated from some shame, thank God.

Now all this brings me to a conversation after the last “Singing Meditation” when a congregational member was talking about shame and mentioned a book I read many years “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware.

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent many years working in palliative care. She worked with patients who were close to death, during the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded the patients dying epiphanies in a blog called “Inspiration and Chai”, this led to a book that she published a few years ago called “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”. In the book she describes the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives and what this can teach we who live on. She highlighted that there were five particular themes that emerged from her conversations.

The five regrets were:

Number 1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me: "This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."

Number 2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard: "This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."

Number 3: I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings: "Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."

Number 4: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends: "Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."

Number 5: I wish that I had let myself be happier: "This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

I found these top five regrets very interesting, I wonder what we who live, what ours might be. There is time to do something about it and live with a sense of freedom and enjoy what time we have left, for while we are certainly living, we are also dying. I have, in recent weeks, sensed a deepening peace in my being as I have addressed certainly three of the five regrets. This is good, this is progress. It is good to know I am not a total slave to perfectionism. That said there is still some regret, there is guilt for mistakes I have made, but there is a decreasing sense of shame, thank God.

I know that most of the guilt and regret, the source of shame in my life, stems from a lack of courage at times, to not do what was mine to do and to live the life as authentically as I could. I feel less shame about this though as it just proves to me how fully human I am, there is no shame in that.

That said I still live with regrets though and I carry no shame about this.

Some say that they have no regrets about anything. It is interesting that perhaps the most heard song at funerals is “My Way” by Frank Sinatra and that famous line “Regrets I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention” or perhaps the famous Edith Piath “je ne regrette rien” no regret. A more modern version would be Robbie Williams’ “No Regrets”

Is this really true though? Can any of us truly say that as our lives end that we have no regrets? I’m not sure I can. I cannot make the claim that I have no regrets at all. There have been many failures and mistakes along the way. Most folk live with regret and struggle with parts of their past. Like King David I am sure we could all write our Psalms of Lament.

Regret is an interesting word, originally it was a kind of lament, from the Old French word ‘regreter”, meaning “one who bewails the dead,” which comes from a Germanic root meaning “to greet.” So, it makes sense that it is the dying that perhaps feel regret the most intensely. As Mark Nepo has said of regret “We always face these two phases of regret: to bewail what is dead and gone, and, if we can move through that grief, to greet the chance to do things differently as we move on.” Regret can inspire us to change, so long as it is not fuelled by shame.

Nepo notes something of real value here, it is a lesson from grief. Yes, regret is a lament for what has gone, what has died, but if we greet it fully with love we can learn from the past and do things differently in the future. The response to regret is both of life and death. The choice is ours. By the way this is the one choice we have in life. We do not choose what happens to us but we can choose how we respond to what happens to us. This is the one ultimate freedom, that is open to all of us.

To quote Viktor Frankl:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

So, the response to regret is ours. We can either choose life or death. We can close in and shut down or we can create with love.

There are two wonderful examples of responses to regret in the New Testament. They are found in the Easter narrative, following Jesus’s betrayal. Luke’s Gospel (Ch22 vv 60-62) depicts Peter regretting his betrayal of Jesus. He wept bitterly for his fear based denial and yet how did he respond. Well, it was on Peter that the earlier Christian Church was built. For Peter Hope was once again born. Matthew (Ch 27 vv 3-5) depicts a very different response to regret that of Judas Iscariot. This is much closer to the original meaning of regret, which meant to bewail the dead. His response was to take his life. Both Peter and Judas can be seen as examples of how we can act with guilt or from shame over the things we regret in life, we are all much the same.

Regret has its place; we need to feel it and to respond in life giving and affirming ways. It matters how we live with regret, is it in life affirming ways or shame based life denying ones.

As Joan Chittister wrote in “The Gift of Years”

“The burden of regret is that, unless we come to understand the value of the choices we made in the past, we may fail to see the gifts they have brought us.

The blessing of regret is clear — it brings us, if we are willing to face it head on, to the point of being present to this new time of life in an entirely new way. It urges us on to continue becoming.”

We all have regrets. It is delusional to say that we should never have them, in fact a person who never feels regret or guilt has something missing in their humanity. Yes, regrets, fuelled by shame, can gnaw away at our souls, but it we are wise, regrets can be powerful teachers. We need a lot of humility and curiosity to learn from our regrets rather than simply allowing them to whittle away at the spirit. Above all we need hope: if we regret something but are willing to learn from it, we must dare to hope that we can learn from it. All humility is, in some sense, a thing of hope: when we humble ourselves, we are living in the hope that we can do better.

So I say let’s face and truly know those things we regret, no matter how many times we have failed to live up to our ideals. Let’s be powered by appropriate guilt and not fetted by inappropriate shame. We need not be paralysed lamenting the past, nore do we need to close the door on it. Let us instead move through the grief of regret and greet the future with its possibility of what might yet be.

Below is a video devotion based 

on the material in this "blogspot"

Our Rituals of Christmas Time: Personal, Universal and Timeless

The last two years have made it difficult for many of us to engage in many of our usual Christmas time rituals. The pandemic meant that we could not socially mix as we normally would. We had to find new ways to be more creative. As is the human way, we often did. I suspect we always have. The spirit always finds a way to bring light, to bring hope, when hope is hard to find. Even this year has felt a little strange with the football World Cup taking place as we engage in our usual get togethers. So yes Christmas has been different these last few years, but I know that its spirits burns just as bright as ever. It has certainly felt this way for these last few days. I know Christmas will once again be different for me this year, it feels good though.

Christmas means different things to each and every one of us. Do you know what, it always has. People often cry that it’s not what it used to be. Well do you know what it used to be many years ago is not what it used to be many years before then. Christmas, like everything is always in flux, nothing ever stays the same, this is the nature of reality.

Now despite the ever changing rituals and celebrations there does appear to be a universal spirit that has always existed. Do you know what the spirit has existed longer than the Christmas story and stories. Christmas is the ultimate Universal mythos of the heart.

Now while myths may not be be real, they are certainly true. Myth," said the Greek statesman Solon, “is not about something that never happened. It is about something that happens over and over again.”

So we keep on telling these stories over and over again, adding to the cannon. Why? Well be cause they keep on happening over and over again.

For many people Christmas is a time of love and compassion of bringing to the surface our better selves. For others it is about family (however we understand family) coming together. For some it is about God’s Love incarnating perfectly in life, in the Christ child. For others it is the celebration of the end of winter and the coming of life and renewal in the spring time. I think it is all of this and a whole lot more. It seems to me that Christmas is the ultimate universal festival of the heart. It is a mixture of so many traditions and it has altered so much over time, embracing and incorporating so much of this simple spirit of light and love. Christmas is the ultimate festival of the heart, perfectly placed in the deep mid-winter when we need it the most.

As the years go by the meaning of Christmas has changed for me, as the meaning of life has. I suspect it means more to me today than it has ever done. Every year this meaning grows. Christmas is not just another day to me, in fact it has truly become a season, the season of the heart come to life. Religiously it means more to me too. As time as gone by I have connected increasingly to the many and varied rituals of Christmas. Ok some may see these rituals as secular, but I am not convinced. I see the spirit at the heart of Christmas incarnating in all of them.

I love Christmas, I truly do. I love it because it fills my heart with nostalgia, generosity and goodwill, it connects me to life, to God and to the people around me, it connects me to the past, to my ancestors and to those who touched my life, many who are no longer here. I shed many tears around this time of year. It happened three times on Tuesday, the first as I was pushing and pulling weights in the gym, not a place for tears really. The other two times as I read and received messages of thanks for this work I do, how it filled my heart with thanksgiving. All this allows me to feel more alive. It opens up the present, the ultimate gift of life. The spiritual life is not about passively living in the moment, but truly bringing the moment to life.

Christmas is the heart of the year. Christmas is about Kairos time, not Chronos time. Time slows and our experiences thicken, if we allow them to. If we open our hearts truly to the spirit at work in the experiences. If we open our hearts to one another our relationships will deepen. What is more religious than this? For me to be religious is to increase our connection and to be spiritual is to increase our sensitivity, our experience of life.

An example of this are the many rituals that we all engage in each and every year. Such as going to buy a new tree, or fetching the artificial one from where ever we store it in the house. Getting out the decorations and placing them around the home. Myself and Molly had a lovely time chatting with Frank, Aled and Nick as they finished putting up the tree in the chapel gardens at Dunham Road. Molly loves Christmas trees, or should I say she loves stealing baubles from them.

For so many people simple rituals like putting up and decorating the tree connects us to our past and those who have touched our lives. There are so many memories tied up in these rituals. The memories will be mixed, as life is mixed, to misquote good old Moses “The blessings and curses of choosing life”. How many of us laugh and cry as we engage with these rituals and of course pass on the memories, rebind them, bring them to life, remember, reincarnate them. Isn’t this love re-incarnated. Yes, there is religion in the ribbons, but also in the baubles and tinsels. These memories are not always happy and there will always be tears, but no doubt in some way they connect us to those “Glad tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy, glad tidings of comfort and joy.

Then of course there is the music, whether that be carols and carol singing or the many and numerous pop songs and classic songs from the old movies. For every service during in December you all insist on only singing carols and I’m with you all the way here by the way. The pop songs are no less religious, no less spiritual to me. They connect me to my past and those I’ve heard and sung these songs with and they help bring the moment more fully alive. They increase my experience of life too, they open my heart, they incarnate love. A taste of heaven.

I had an experience with this last Saturday night as I reengaged with a love that has been with me all my life. I went on a congregational outing with Rob, Helen and Nick from Dunham Road. We went to see my great musical love, New Model Army. It was a great night, they were on fine form. It was a truly religious experience and one so many have missed engaging in. They have for years played a mini tour around Christmas time.

Then of course there are the films, those great Christmas stories. For so many of us this is the heart of Christmas. What is your favourite? What film is at the heart of Christmas for you? They may appear to be secular, at least on the surface, but I bet you that they have within the same universal Christmas Mythos going on, that is at the heart of the Christmas story.

All these rituals to me are deeply religious and spiritual also. They connect us to one another, to life, that spirit at the heart of life, they connect us to our past and those who have touched our lives and they bring the gift of Christmas to life, the ultimate gift of Christmas, the present, the Christmas present. It truly increases our sensitivity to life itself.

Another universal quality is the journeying of Christmas. There is of course chronos journey through the Advent season as we open our Advent Calendars and count down the days. There are the journeys to buy the gifts for loved ones, there is the journey to events and parties. There is the journey home also. Journeying is of course at the heart of the Christmas mythos. Whether that is the journey of the Holy Family of Joseph and Mary, carrying the Christ child in her womb on the road to Bethlehem, of the refusal to be accepted, of the magical birth and adorations and then of course having to flee for their lives, a journey we can all relate to in so many ways. Journey’s people have been travelling on for generations. Then of course there is the journey of the Magi, the wisemen, who were called out to cross many lands in order to follow their bliss and bring gifts of love to the beloved.

These are journey’s of distance. But also journeys of depth. They are both chronos and Kairos journeys. I will be doing some journeying over the next few weeks. As I am sure you will all be doing so too. They will be journey’s of hope and of sorrow, of joy and laughter and some pain. They will be religious journey’s and spiritual journey’s, journeys of the heart. Journey’s that will increase our sensitivity to life and deepen our connections to one another, to life, to our past, our present and the future. It will open our hearts and in so doing incarnate love here in our lives.

It will help me follow in the great tradition of Mr Scrooge and his famous words at the end of “A Christmas Carol”

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

So let’s journey on through this Christmas season and truly open our hearts and engage in its spirit. May our hearts open wider, at this the heart of the year. May our experiences deepen as we remember to slow down as we rush through the business of our days. May we know the true gifts of the season; gifts of love, compassion and acceptance. May we bring the spirit of the season alive and in so doing learn to make it Christmas in the days yet to come.

Oh I wish it could be Christmas every day, well it can be if we make it so, if we bring it to life through our humble human being.

Below is a video devotion based

 on the material in this blogspot

 

Turning Presents Into True Gifts

We are now fully into the Advent Season, the days that lead to Christmas Day. These are the days of waiting of preparation. The music is playing, we can hear all the familiar songs in every shop as we no doubt begin the process of selecting presents for our loved ones.

Have you done all your shopping yet? I’ve not even begun. I will soon, but not just yet. I’ve got too much to do.

Have you experienced any “Bah Humbug” moments yet?

I noticed one from a friend of mine. She posted a “Meme” on Facebook. A cartoon depicting two figures. The first is putting up Christmas decorations and saying to the other “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” to which the other responds in far less enthusiastic way “It’s not Christmas though is it Barbara, because it is still XXXXXXX November.”

The Meme was a protest against how soon Christmas had begun this year, especially in the shops etc. I replied to the ”Meme” stating “Just to be an annoying pedant. It’s Advent, it began on Sunday. If you want to be truly liturgically accurate Christmas doesn’t actually begin until sunset on Christmas Eve. None of us want that, so please no more Bah Humbugging. “There followed many other complaints about the celebration of Christmas coming too early, people putting up their decorations too early etc. I put up mine on Tuesday night. I have gone much further than I usually do. Molly is certainly enjoying this. It seems she loves stealing baubles from the tree and playing with them. I have had to move Father Christmas and his little helpers out of her reach. Many folk have been telling me off all week for doing so, telling me I wasn’t allowed to until Thursday 1st December, to which I replied that Advent had already begun. It’s funny how folk suddenly get all Puritanical about these things from time to time.

I get where this all comes from, especially as it has been Christmas in most of the shops, since the beginning of November. There has been a Christmas tree in Café Nero for weeks. I know this because Molly stole a bauble from their tree several weeks ago. It has been her favourite toy since then.

The “Bah humbugging” about the early celebration of Christmas stems from this sense of over commercialisation and the thought that the spirit of the season will be lost. It seems that for many Christmas has become an almost secular exercise. Afterall less than half of the population now identify as Christian, at least according the figures published this week, from last year’s census.

Is it true though. Have we killed the spirit of the season with this over commercialisation? I’m not convinced. I think the spirit lives on and actually is present in the very act of such celebrations and even the buying and commercial activities.

If we look purely at the surface, there appears little evidence of my view. The Christmas season appears to be mass consumerism gone mad. The worst excesses of which seem to form in that most hideous of American imports “Black Friday”, which in reality is linked to the American holiday of “Thanksgiving”. We have not taken that part on, just “Black Friday”, not the giving of thanks bit. This occurred over the weekend that Advent began. And yet there is the spirit of Christmas in the spiritual elements of “Thanks Giving”. This is surely something that can be extended into this Advent season and on into Christmas itself. The spirit of Christmas is surely about giving thanks for the gifts we have been given and expressing this thanks in our lives by using our gifts in this our lives. We can become gifts to this our world, we can live in and through gratitude.

This can be exemplified in the presents that we buy for our loved ones, as they can become gifts. If chosen and wrapped with loving intention, then surely even this commercial activity is spiritual in nature.

In “The Gift” by David Blanchard, distinguished between a gift and a present. How the gift has a far more deeply spiritual and heartfelt significance than merely a present. It touched a part, deep in the heart of me.

Now of course the word “present” is something the spiritually inclined are obsessed with in our current age. So many talk of the gift of the present moment, that this is where life is. I’m certainly not one to wish to argue with these thoughts. That said I wonder if sometimes we become so obsessed with the present that we forget about the gifts we carry with us that we have been given in those many moments in the past. Too often we wish to lose what has gone before in our intense focus on the present that we fail to embrace the gifts that have come throughout our lives. I have come to believe that to truly embrace the moment, to be truly present requires me to be fully engaged with every moment of my life, for there the true gifts of life emerge.

Perhaps to truly live in the present moment is to bring our whole selves, every breath of our lives and perhaps every life that has made our life into this sublime moment.

This year I have reflected much on my life, perhaps more than I have for a while. I have thought much about the gifts I’ve been given throughout my days. Gifts I have not always appreciated at the time. In fact, many I failed to notice when they were given. The gifts of the love given by the precious people I have shared my life with, some who are no longer physically with me. The things they took the time to show me, how to do things and just how to be; the times they made me laugh and cry; the joy that they brought to my being. Gifts given freely from their heart to mine.

I’ve also been thinking of the many gifts I was simply born with, that I have not always made best use of, the Graces of life. I have been contemplating how I can make better use of these, the ultimate of free gifts, not just for myself but for the good of all?

Here's an extract from a prayer I shared during the Advent service.

Now is the moment of magic,

and here's a blessing:
we already possess all the gifts we need;
we've already received our presents:
ears to hear music,
eyes to behold lights,
hands to build true peace on earth
and to hold each other tight in love.

How do we make good use of the gifts we have been given from the beginning and throughout our lives? How do we bring these gifts to life in this beautiful present that is right here, right now? How do we make best use of the gift of life?

I will leave that one with you to ponder…

For most of us Christmas is about the giving and receiving of presents, but not necessarily about the gifts we both give and receive.

I suspect that the tradition of giving and receiving gifts at Christmas time is linked to the three gifts of the Magi “Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh”. Gifts of great value 2,000 years ago, although only gold has retained its worth today. Now in early Christianity the journey of the Magi was celebrated on the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January, the 12th day of Christmas, hence the Carol “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree”…etc...)

The early Christian church did not celebrate Christmas as we do today. The tradition of giving Christmas presents is really a modern one. By Victorian times the culture of gift giving and the mythos of Father Christmas, St Nicholas or Santa Claus was beginning to take hold, immortalised in the fiction of Dickens and the like. As the twentieth century moved on into the twenty first this culture developed into mass consumerism. Today it would seem that buying, wrapping and giving gifts has become nothing more than a mechanical chore and one of the worst examples of mass consumerism going. Is this really what Christmas is about? Is this really giving by heart? Is this really the spirit of Christmas? Well it is if we select, give and receive these gifts in the spirit of love. In so doing we bring the spirit of season alive, by incarnating the words from my favourite Carol “In the Bleak mid-winter”…

“What shall I give him? Give my heart”

I believe that the true spirit of Christmas is the heart, that this is the gift of the season. Christmas above everything else truly is the season of the heart. When we truly give our gifts to others we are giving them our hearts and when we truly give from our heart to another we are somehow bringing that heart of God alive and that spirit is once again incarnating in life.

This is the religion, the spirit that can still be discovered beneath the ribbons and the wrapping paper. This is the spirit that can once again come alive if we engage in the giving and receiving of gifts and not merely presents. This is one way in which we can truly begin to become a gift to the world.

When I really think of the gifts I have been given the greatest is of course life itself. This is of course the ultimate free gift. The ultimate unearned grace. It is easy to say we are grateful, for the gifts we have been given, whether at Christmas or throughout the year; whether they are material or spiritual in nature. But I am not so sure that this is what gratitude actually is. Gratitude is anactive thing, it is more than giving thanks, it is doing something with the gifts we have been given.

This is something to reflect on over the coming weeks as we approach Christmas. To consider the gifts that we have been granted and to perhaps think of the gifts we would like. To remember, but not passively, let’s instead make it an act of remembrance, of all that has been freely given to us, gifted to us. Let’s also make from these gifts a true act of gratitude for all that is our lives. Let’s become a part of the gift that is life itself and express this in our being. Let’s become the gift to the world. And pour out this gift on one another and to all life, in all that we feel, all that we think, all that we say and all that we do…

Below is a devotion based on 

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